Cooking Academy

SCORE: 83

Family Friendly Gaming was provided a copy of Cooking Academy by one
of our advertisers. They thought it would be interesting for us to
review this Personal Computer video game. Cooking Academy is a clone of
Cooking Mama. Cooking Academy is also a game from 2008. So it is not a
recent video game. It does try to get into the ball park with Cooking
Mama.

Cooking Academy looks nice, and it sounds nice. I am not a fan of the
art style, and the music gets boring and repetitive. The cooks do not
have sound bytes in Cooking Academy. Remember Cooking Mama came out a
few years before Cooking Academy, and it had sound bytes in it. Plus
Cooking Mama came out on the Nintendo DS, and not the Personal Computer.
I expect a lot more from Cooking Academy.

The mini games get repetitive in Cooking Academy too. The biggest
problem with the set up of Cooking Academy is you have to pass all of
the appetizer recipes, and then the exam to unlock any of the breakfast.
This limitation hurts Cooking Academy. Again I compare it to Cooking
Mama. Which had a lot more variety, and a lot more recipes. Cooking
Academy should have knocked Cooking Mama out of the water.

The controls in Cooking Academy were off and on. Some of them worked in
the repetitive mini games, and others were glitchy. Which is not a good
thing when a timer is running and you are mainly graded on time. There
are some like frying things where more than time is part of the grading.
I also questioned some of the grades in Cooking Academy. At times it was
nice to me, and others it was cruel.

I wish the food at the end of each recipe looked realistic in Cooking
Academy. Again a hand held game did this better, and that is a real
shame to a Personal Computer video game. The chefs in Cooking Academy
feel like afterthoughts with little to no personality. I wanted to like
them or dislike them. I wanted to have some reaction to them. They were
just there every so often.

Cooking Academy has potential. Now that Cooking Mama is not around as
much, there is an opportunity for someone to take the formula, improve
upon it, and release it. I see there was a sequel to Cooking Academy. I
may have to look into it in the future. I had some fun playing Cooking
Academy. If I had never played Cooking Mama, I would probably like
Cooking Academy a lot more.
- Yolanda

Thank you for visiting
Family Friendly Gaming Universe. This website is for and about video games
from a family friendly viewpoint. The Family Friendly Gaming website goes
hand in hand with the Family Friendly Gaming magazine - which was the first
ever Christian video game magazine. There are plenty of family friendly
video games out there; we work very hard to find them for you, and to give
them their much deserved time in the lime light. Not everything from the
video game industry is bad, and we do our small part to exhibit that. We
hope you enjoy what we do, as much as we enjoy doing it. This website is the original
full fledged free video game site for families. Often imitated, but never
duplicated. Family Friendly Gaming remains safe for the entire family, and
thanks you for your continued support and trust. Together we continue to
make a major impact on the video game industry. We are so very thankful you
stopped by to visit us. Expect the Holy Bible to be used to back up our
opinions.